Spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) is a flowering plant of the Amaranthaceae family that is grown as a vegetable. The edible parts of the spinach plant are the leaves of the vegetative stage. During the vegetative stage spinach produces a rosette of leaves. These leaves are crinkly and curly in the case of savoy leaf types, slightly crinkled in the case of semi-savoy leaf types, or broad and flat in the case of smooth leaf types. The leaves of a spinach plant are usually sold fresh clipped and bagged, fresh bunched, canned or frozen. The dominant spinach product in the market is the fresh clipped and bagged spinach. This bagged product is sold as either baby spinach containing very small, young leaves, or as teenage spinach containing slightly older, medium-sized leaves. Both baby and teenage spinach leaf sizes are smaller than the leaf sizes at harvest of bunched, frozen or canned spinach. Usually the harvested leaves of baby spinach are no longer than about eight centimeter. These tender, sweet leaves are often used in salads, but can also be lightly cooked or steamed.
Lifestyles change and the demand from restaurants, catering firms and even from the customer in the supermarket for colourful and attractive leafy vegetables for salads or other dishes continues to rise. As a result, vegetable breeding companies are looking for varieties with prominent colour, better taste and a wide variety of textures.
Though spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) is a popular product due to its attractive taste and high nutritional value, at present spinach cannot add a lot of colour other than green to dishes or salad mixes. The most colourful spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) that has been known so far has green leaves with a red petiole and red major veins. These plants have green leaves with a red colouration of the leaves that is confined to the petiole and leaf blade areas where the primary, secondary, and in some cases also tertiary, veins are located, while the leaf blade areas between the veins are green. An example of such a plant is presented in FIG. 2D.
FIG. 1 shows a picture and a schematic representation of a spinach leaf, indicating the petiole and the lamina, which is often indicated as the leaf blade, with its primary, secondary and tertiary veins.
Citation or identification of any document in this application is not an admission that such document is available as prior art to the present invention.